Nano Banana Pro - where the light comes from is the whole shot

Ever look at an AI product shot and it just feels flat, even when everything's sharp?

Usually it's the light. Most prompts say "studio lighting" and stop, so the model lights the whole thing evenly and the product ends up with no shape. I ran five products twice to test it, and the biggest jumps came from describing where the light was. Not clients, just a test.

Here's my exact process.

1. Say where the light comes from, not just "studio"

"studio lighting" tells the model nothing about direction, so it hedges and lights everything flat. On the olive oil I asked for a soft key from the front-left and a faint rim light behind it to lift the bottle off the dark background. That alone gave it shape.

2. Backlight anything you can see through

Glass, oil, liquid and gemstones only look rich when the light comes through them. On the oil I added a backlight glowing through it into a warm inner glow, without blowing out the highlights. On the watch, asking for a subtle refraction through the sapphire crystal did the same thing, it stopped reading like a flat disc and started looking like real glass.

3. Decide where the dark falls

Shape comes from shadow as much as light. I kept everything on a near-black background on purpose, so a thin rim light along the edge carried the silhouette and the metal caught crisp specular highlights instead of a dull sheen. Light the background too and all of that disappears.

Why it works

"Studio lighting" makes the model guess, and it always guesses the same safe, even light that makes everything look like a 3D icon. When I said where the key was, what to backlight and where to let the shadows sit, the model had an actual lighting setup to build instead of a default.

Your turn: take your next product prompt and add one line about where the light comes from and what it should catch. Start there.

And if you'd rather skip the prompting, Emero writes the prompts for you and remembers the look you like so you're not spelling out the lighting every time. Everything's at cost.